Farming in the Uplands - ARCHIVE: Defra

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee: Evidence Ev 3
27 October 2010 Dr Stuart Burgess and Professor Mark Shucksmith
Society, community empowerment and localism. I
hope that the analysis, advice and workings of the
Policy Unit are available not only to Government
behind closed doors, but are also available to
communities in rural areas.
Q9 Amber Rudd: There has been some questioning
though of whether advocacy by a publicly funded
body, a quango in effect, is the right use of public
money. I know the Secretary of State raised that on
Farming Today, saying that the public might be
surprised to find that their money was being used as
advocacy for a particular group. Do you have a view
on that particular comment perhaps?
Professor Shucksmith: I think that’s largely a matter
for Government and for Parliament. We were given
a statutory responsibility by Parliament to be Rural
Advocates, expert advisers and rural watchdogs, with
a particular focus on rural disadvantage, and that’s
what we did.
Q10 Amber Rudd: Do you think that Defra will
have sufficient strength to represent and to advocate
for rural communities, once that responsibility is
absorbed into Defra?
Stuart Burgess: My hope would be that that would
be the case. Certainly the role of the Rural Advocate,
as I interpreted it, was about going around and
travelling extensively, drilling right down to rural
communities and listening very closely to their
concerns and their needs, and having an overview
from a national perspective. That could easily be lost
in all this, if we’re not careful, which I think would
be very sad.
Q11 George Eustice: Turning to your report on the
uplands, I wonder if you can tell me what it was that
persuaded you to do a report in this area. Was there a
particular challenge that’s come recently or a
particular set of evidence that made you think this
particular Commission was necessary?
Stuart Burgess: That’s a very interesting question. It
spans the last 20 years of my life, to be perfectly
honest. Working up in Yorkshire as a church leader, I
spent a lot of time with the hill farmers up there,
realising that there could be a potential difficulty and
a problem in the future, bearing in mind their low
incomes. It wasn’t just that; it was the knock-on effect.
The particular role I had was the relationship to
communities as well, and putting it in the focus of
rural communities. When I was appointed Rural
Advocate and Chair of the Commission for Rural
Communities, I particularly went around other areas,
other than Yorkshire, for example in Northumberland,
and especially up in Cumbria. It was on visits to
Cumbria that I saw not only the problem but also the
potential that could be there around hill farming and
hill farming communities.
In my report to the then Prime Minister, my Rural
Advocate’s Report, I said I thought there was a piece
of work that needed to be done around the future of
hill farming. There has been a lot of work done in the
last 20 years, and Mark has been instrumental in some
of that. It would be, if you like, a fresh look, not only
at the hill farming, but putting it in the context, as I
would re-emphasise, of rural communities. It was the
Prime Minister who came back and said, as many
people often do, “You’ve identified a piece of work.
Why don’t you get on and do a piece of work about
it?” That’s the origins of it and how it came to be.
A number of the commissioners have been incredibly
helpful over this, Mark included, and members of
staff. We have really put our thinking caps on and
came up with—I’m a bit biased obviously—a pretty
good report.
Q12 George Eustice: Are the challenges the same,
effectively, between all the different upland
communities that you mention?
Stuart Burgess: There are many similarities between
them, but obviously the geographical areas and the
demographic areas of, for example, the South West
and up in Cumbria and Northumberland are quite
different. The context is quite different. If you go, for
example, into the High Peak area, the context there is
in the close proximity of large urban areas. If you go
into other upland areas, you don’t get that same
context, and it is a context that is absolutely critical
to all this. The challenges are across the piece and
across the board, and we have identified many similar
strands linking those upland communities.
Professor Shucksmith: If I can just add to that, I think
each upland area is different, in so far as everybody
we spoke to was very proud of their own area and its
traditions, and was keen to point out what was special
about it. The processes of change, the cost of
providing public services for example, the measures
that are there in support of hill farming, processes of
housing change, all these things, were acting on all
the areas. Clearly the more urban areas in the High
Peak were affected in a different way from north
Northumberland. The Lake District, with all the
tourist pressures, would be different from an upland
area that didn’t have those tourist pressures, but there
seemed to be common processes for the most part to
varying degrees, overlaid on what were historically
and culturally different places.
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Q13 George Eustice: You’re right: it’s a very
detailed piece of work; you take huge amounts of
evidence. Is there anything that you wish that you had
spent more time on or developed? You had a little bit
of criticism from the NFU and the Countryside
Alliance saying that it didn’t come up with the
answers.
Stuart Burgess: If I had more time, where would I
concentrate? I was fascinated and taken up by the
potential of carbon storage in the uplands. We touched
on this in one of our sections, as you may have
gathered. I was inspired by the work that the
University of Nottingham is doing. It is linking up
with other universities, and pioneering some very
interesting work. It also obviously links up to the
assets in the upland areas; how all this could be tapped
into and also how potential money could be generated.
If I had more time and perhaps a more scientific mind,
I would like to really tease out what are the
implications of potential carbon storage, and the
money that could be made there for the hill farmers.